THE SoCAL SONGBOOK

The new album from West Indian Girl is called “4th and Wall,” which is the chaotic L.A. intersection the band looks down upon when it rehearses facing the cracked windows of its fifth-floor studio downtown. During the day, the view is one of asphalt tumult between the cars, cops, delivery trucks and homeless people that pass through the Toy District at assorted velocities. At night, the sidewalks are taken over by cardboard boxes as the street people pull themselves into their solitary shelters like hermit crabs on a sooty beach.

“We are so immersed in the downtown scene,” said Robert James, the primary singer in the band. “We see a lot of the homeless side of L.A. and there’s this feeling of intensity you get from people who are in a survival mode. I think to really know life you have to be friendly with your own death, your own mortality. It sounds kind of morbid doesn’t it? I didn’t mean it to.”

There’s a whiff of the morbid in the title of their first single, “To Die in L.A.,” but on closer inspection, with its gilded guitar riffs and swooning, angelic background vocals, the song is more in tune with the blood-tingle of wide-awake life than it is with the big sleep. The title may sound like the final curtain, but the lyrics are about the players still on stage.

We see

Bright lights, another day, I’m waking up,

Into the street, stay on beat, here it comes

Believe

So I get high to lift myself, remembering,

I’m running late, I’m running late, here it comes

And you don’t know how you got there

You don’t know why you got there

James and his bandmates have become more than tourists on the street. James said he brings food, gifts and an occasional bottle of wine to some of his sidewalk neighbors. They, in turn, offer critiques of the music that blares down from the windows above. “It’s the same characters out there, it’s the same tapestry. The homeless are not as simple to define as people think. The reasons they are there and the life they live is not always simple.”

James said there was one woman he remembers. She was older, but her face was unlined and her smile was as sunny as the Caribbean island where she was born. She asked for a cigarette and sang a wavering song that kept echoing in the young musician’s mind. “I hadn’t seen her before. There’s such a cultural mix on the street too, all these languages and people from so far away. With her, you could hear life in her voice, and there was a lot of sadness but a lot of joy too. I think it’s about looking at yourself from outside yourself.”

Inside

Sunday, Monday, pass the time away

Friday, Saturday’s on, here it comes

La dee da

And the world’s a song that plays along,

La dee da dee day, to die in L.A.